Saturday, March 21, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Termcraft – terminal-first 2D sandbox survival in Rust

Show HN: Termcraft – terminal-first 2D sandbox survival in Rust
4 by sebosch | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I’ve been building termcraft, a terminal-first 2D sandbox survival game in Rust. The idea is to take the classic early survival progression and adapt it to a side-on terminal format instead of a tile or pixel-art engine. Current build includes: - procedural Overworld, Nether, and End generation - mining, placement, crafting, furnaces, brewing, and boats - hostile and passive mobs - villages, dungeons, strongholds, Nether fortresses, and dragon progression This is still early alpha, but it’s already playable. Project: https://ift.tt/2FwN0pg Docs: https://pagel-s.github.io/termcraft/ Demo: https://youtu.be/kR986Xqzj7E

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Joonote – A note-taking app on your lock screen and notification panel

Show HN: Joonote – A note-taking app on your lock screen and notification panel
12 by kilgarenone | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I finally built this app after many years of being sick of unlocking my phone every goddamn time I need to take or view my notes. It particularly sucks when I'm doing my grocery and going down the list. I started building last year June. This is a native app written in Kotlin. And since I'm a 100% Web dev guy, I gotta say this wouldn't have been possible without this AI to assist me. So this isn't "vibe-coded". I simply used the chat interface in Gemini website, manually copy paste codes to build and integrate every single thing in the app! I used gemini to build it just because I was piggybacking on my last company's enterprise subscription. I personally didn't subscribe to any AI (and still don't cuz the free quota seems enough for me :) So I certainly have learnt alot about Android development, architecture patterns, Kotlin syntax, and obeying Google's whims. Can't say I love it all, but for the sake of this app, I will :) Anyway, I finally have the app I wish existed, and I'm using it everyday. It not only does the main thing I needed it to do, but there's also all this stuff: - Make your notes private if you don't want to show them on lock screen. - Create check/to-do lists. - Set one time or recurring reminders. - Full-text search your notes in the app. - Speech-to-text. - Organize your notes with custom or color labels. - Pin the app as a widget on your home screen. - You can auto backup and restore your notes on new install or Android device. - Works offline. - And no funny business happening in the background https://ift.tt/Wwmlke3 It's 30-day trial, then a one-time $9.99 to go Pro forever. I would love you all to check it out, FWIW. Ok thanks!

Friday, March 20, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I made an email app inspired by Arc browser

Show HN: I made an email app inspired by Arc browser
4 by johndamaia | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Email is one of those tools we check daily but its underlying experience didn’t evolve much. I use Gmail, as probably most of you reading this. The Arc browser brought joy and taste to browsing the web. Cursor created a new UX with agents ready to work for you in a handy right panel. I use these three tools every day. Since Arc was acquired by Atlassian, I’ve been wondering: what if I built a new interface that applied Arc’s UX to email rather than browser tabs, while making AI agents easily available to help manage emails, events, and files? I built a frontend PoC to showcase the idea. Try it: https://demo.define.app I’m not sure about it though... Is it worth continuing to explore this idea?

New top story on Hacker News: Our Commitment to Windows Quality

Our Commitment to Windows Quality
36 by hadrien01 | 25 comments on Hacker News.

New top story on Hacker News: BYD's bet on EVs is paying off as drivers ditch gas amid rising oil prices

BYD's bet on EVs is paying off as drivers ditch gas amid rising oil prices
57 by ironyman | 25 comments on Hacker News.

Thursday, March 19, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Dumped Wix for an AI Edge agent so I never have to hire junior staff

Show HN: Dumped Wix for an AI Edge agent so I never have to hire junior staff
8 by axotopia | 10 comments on Hacker News.
I run a building design consultancy. I got tired of paying Wix $40/month for a brochure that couldn’t answer simple service questions, and me wasting hours on the same FAQs. So I killed it all and spent 4 months building a 'talker': https://axoworks.com The stack is completely duct-taped: Netlify’s 10s serverless timeout forced me to split the agent into three pieces: Brain (Edge), Hands (Browser), and Voice (Edge). I haven’t coded in 30 years. This was 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, heavily guided by AI. The fight that proved it worked: 2 weeks ago, a licensed architect attacked the bot, trying to prove my business model harms the profession. The AI (DeepSeek-R3) completely dismantled his arguments. It was hilariously caustic. Log: https://ift.tt/zVCS23w... A few battle scars: * Web Speech API works fine, right up until someone speaks Chinese without toggling the language mode. Then it forcefully spits out English phonetic gibberish. Still a headache. * Liability is the killer. Hallucinate a building code clause? We’re dead. Insurance won’t touch us. * We publish the audit logs to keep ourselves honest and make sure the system stays hardened. Audit: https://ift.tt/trWkeDm The hardest part was getting the intent right: making one LLM pivot seamlessly from a warm principal’s tone with a homeowner, to a defensive bulldog when attacked by a peer. That took 2.5 months of tuning. We burn through tokens with an 'Eager RAG' hack (pre-fetching guesses) just to improve responsiveness. I also ripped out the “essential” persistent DBs—less than 5% of visitors ever return, so why bother? If a client drops mid-query, their session vanishes. No server-side queues. The point: To let me operate with a network of seasoned pros, and trim the fat. Try to break it. I’ll be in the comments. Kee

Sunday, March 8, 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Skir – like Protocol Buffer but better

Show HN: Skir – like Protocol Buffer but better
13 by gepheum | 11 comments on Hacker News.
Why I built Skir: https://ift.tt/8vqKg6i... Quick start: npx skir init All the config lives in one YML file. Website: https://skir.build GitHub: https://ift.tt/GM8qU5C Would love feedback especially from teams running mixed-language stacks.